On her knees the woman looks at a picture
to better see the center of her interest.
It's a reproduction print of The Last Supper!
That's when our gazes meet she asking
I tell her. She repeats,
"Where was the painter when he painted it? "
I tell her again while her eyes
intensely focus on the image.
At last she rises with some effort.
At least 6 feet tall
she towers over me like a Goddess
over my last supper.
With great expectations in her voice
she asks me if I ever was in Italy?
I answer yes. That's when
she fixes her gaze on my face and I sense
a tinge of awe as she grins
with her fangs missing.
I smile back at her
exposing my own absence
of two frontal teeth still in my pocket.
We break into a hearty laughter
still looking back and forth
eye to eye
to picture as if following
a spiked ping pong ball.
She asks again,
"Where was the painter when he painted it? "
Baffled, I solicit, is she speaking of location?
She points to the floor and the ceiling
on the image.
I tell her it's the dining room
of the Dominican convent in Milan.
That's when she exclaims she's a painter
to which I reply so I am.
She looks at me with smiling recognition'.
We're cooking.
We're both painting a Last Supper.
Interrupted, we part company.
I go on about my business.
Buying women's leather purses
to repurpose them into book bindings.
It is some three quarters of an hour
later and the sun has set when I walk
outside the store toward my car.
In the darkness, against a very late
sunset, a silhouette approaches me.
I recognize the woman.
She says that I really made her day.
She asks permission to hug me
as a thank you.
I accept and return a close hug.
We say good bye.
Parting she adds, "You smell so good"
Ah! Da Vinci! What have you done to us!
~~~
Alex Nodopaka © Feb 2020
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem